Recently one of my hard drives (2TB) stopped working, I knew it was on its way out and only used it for temporary project work (so I didnt lose anything important that couldn't be retrieved).
I am now left with 3 hard drives (1TB SSHD - 1TB HDD - 320GB HDD) all of which are relatively old.
The 320GB drive (at least 5 years old) is currently used to store my Virtual Machines (and now any temporary project files)
The 1TB SSHD (a year old) is used for both my personal file storage (partition 1) and the OS (partition 2)
The 1TB HDD (at least 3 years old) is used for my Steam games
I am under the impression that having the OS stored on one drive, and personal files on other drives is the best way to maximize performance. As the OS drive has less chance of beingg overloaded with read/write requests. The only reason I don't follow this strictly at the moment is because the 320GB and 1TB HDD have much slower read/write rates.
So, my first question is, is my belief above correct? if not, can you explain why?
Recently my drives have been getting overloaded and the whole computer is locking up (I checked, no viruses), I am a fairly active user and do tend to have a lot of programs open at once, so this is probably the cause, but recently its got to the point where I can't ignore it.
Before going off to uni, I was hoping to change the configuration around (including buying new drive(s). SSDs are probably still out of my price range depending on the fate of my other drives.
TLDR:
Does having multiple drives connected to a computer slow down access to all drives?
Is it beneficial to store the OS on a separate hard drive to personal files?
Would it be worth the investment getting a smallish (64-128GB) SSD purely for the OS and using my left over storage (3 drives totaling 2.3TB of various specs) as space for personal files?
Based on my configuration above, is it worth ditching the oldest 2 hard drives and replacing it with a newer one?
Does a SSHD actually have performance benefits that warrent the extra cost over HDDs?
My hard drives all plug in at the same area on the motherboard yet use different SATA standards (SATA3, SATA2.5 and SATA 1), will my computer only operate as fast as the slowest device or is having the SATA 1 drive limiting overall performance at all?
Thanks
I am under the impression that having the OS stored on one drive, and personal files on other drives is the best way to maximize performance
- I think that's entirely subjective. I'd be interested in seeing emperical data that shows this to be true.